Last week, the latest version of North Star’s client health monitoring system, COMETS, called ‘PANSTARRS’, was rolled out in four of our Roadside Wellness Centres in Tanzania. In the coming weeks, patients visiting our clinics in Dar-es-Salaam, Kahama, Tunduma, and Mwanza will be the first to benefit from the improved system, which supports the diagnosis of a wider range of diseases and enables our clinicians to clearly record complaints, symptoms, their duration, and recognise distinctions between preliminary and final diagnoses. The PANSTARRS version of COMETS also improves on how client health data is recorded and recalled, and adds in additional functions to support voluntary fingerprint scanning, which was recently introduced to some centres.

Developed in cooperation with our partner, ORTEC, COMETS is a client health registration system that enables the exchange of patient-specific data between each North Star operated clinic, as well as the monitoring and evaluation of health trends on the local, national, and regional level.  As a result, mobile populations like long distance truck drivers have the opportunity to continue working while being treated for HIV and other illnesses, safeguarding their income, and the wellbeing of their families.

COMETS was originally launched in 2009, and was recognised in 2013 at the GBC Health ‘Business Action on Health Awards’ where ORTEC received the Technology for Health award. This latest version of COMETS will be gradually rolled out to all locations across our network in the coming months.

Watch a short video on COMETS below, which was originally prepared for the 2013 Business Action on Health Awards.